An indigenous child of Uru-eu-wau-wau tribe, plays a musical instrument during a meeting at Alto Jamari village, called to face the threat of armed land grabbers invading the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Reservation near Campo Novo de Rondonia, Brazil, January 30, 2019. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

Tribes and indigenous rights groups say a surge of threats and illegal incursions have accompanied Bolsonaro’s rise to power.

CAMPO NOVO DE RONDONIA, Brazil, March 3 (Reuters) – Ten days after
Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office, dozens of men
entered protected indigenous land in a remote corner of the Amazon,
hacking a pathway beneath the jungle canopy.

Inspired by Bolsonaro’s vow to open more native territory to
commercial development, the men, armed with machetes, chainsaws and
firearms, had come to stake their claims.

A tense stand-off ensued with members of the Uru-eu-wau-wau tribe,
who captured the January confrontation on a cellphone video viewed by
Reuters. The trespassers threatened to set fire to their villages to
drive them out, tribal members said. Tribesmen readied poison-tipped
arrows in their bows.

The invaders retreated. But a bullet-riddled sign at the entrance to
their sprawling reservation now serves as their calling card.

The placard is emblazoned with the acronym FUNAI, a federal agency
charged with protecting indigenous land rights that is widely loathed by
agricultural interests.

“It was a warning that they are coming back,” Awip Puré
Uru-eu-wau-wau, a 19-year-old tribal member, told Reuters a few weeks
after the encounter in the northwestern state of Rondonia.

The confrontation is part of a surge of threats and illegal
incursions that tribes and indigenous rights groups say have accompanied
Bolsonaro’s rise to power.

Land invasions have increased 150 percent since he was elected in
late October, according to the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a
Brazilian advocacy group.

On the night of Bolsonaro’s victory, a health post and a school were
firebombed on Pankararu lands in northeastern Pernambuco state, CIMI
reported. In midwestern Mato Grosso do Sul, the group said, convoys of
farmers fired shots at the Guaraní Kaiowá community to intimidate the
tribe.

Brazil is home to about 850,000 indigenous people representing
roughly 300 tribes. Their vast reservations, accounting for about 13
percent of Brazil’s territory, have long been a source of conflict with
outsiders looking to tap their natural riches.

Bolsonaro has railed against what he sees as excessive federal
protections for these minorities. He compared natives on reservations to
animals living in zoos, suggesting they would be better off
assimilating and enjoying a cut of profits that could come from opening
their holdings to farming, logging and mining. He has dismissed
reservations as an impediment to agribusiness, one of his top
supporters.

“If I become president, there won’t be one square centimeter of land
designated for indigenous reservations,” he said at a 2017 campaign stop
in the farm state of Mato Grosso.

“His campaign speeches … became a license to invade indigenous
lands,” said Ivaneide Bandeira, head of the ethno-environmental defense
NGO Kanindé.

One of Bolsonaro’s first acts as president was to strip FUNAI of its
role in setting reservation boundaries, passing that authority to the
Agriculture Ministry, which is dominated by rural interests.

The official now in charge of land issues is Nabhan Garcia, a
right-wing farming organizer who has fought reservations for decades.

“The amount of reservation land is monstrous and it’s in the hands of
very few Indians today,” Garcia said in an interview with Reuters.

(For an interactive version of this story, see: https://tmsnrt.rs/2VBxLZV_

TRIBAL ASSEMBLY

The Uru-eu-wau-wau were decimated by illness when farmers arrived in the 1970s with the opening of a road through Rondonia.

Today, their 150 survivors live on a reservation covering 1.9 million
hectares near the border with Bolivia. It is an area larger than the
U.S state of Connecticut.

While some tribal members wear jeans and use cellular phones bought
with government welfare payments and sales of Brazil nuts and cassava
flour, they live largely as their ancestors did, hunting tapirs and wild
boar.

The Uru-eu-wau-wau have faced invasions by illegal loggers and
farmers before. But January’s trespassers were different: They painted
numbers on trees spaced out in precise intervals of 60 hectares (148
acres), a sign they were staking out plots for sale to future settlers.

The tribe called an emergency assembly of its six villages in late
January. Chiefs and warriors painted their bodies, put on headdresses of
macaw fathers and performed a war dance. They wrote a letter pleading
for government protection, warning they would resort to their bows and
arrows if forced to.

“We need this land and its forest trees standing to survive as a people,” Tangae Uru-eu-wau-wau, a village leader, told Reuters.

The assembly was attended by FUNAI’s new boss Franklimberg Ribeiro, a
retired army general of Amazon Indian descent. He assured the
Uru-eu-wau-wau his agency would protect their land.

“We will take action to stop these invasions,” Ribeiro told Reuters after meeting the tribal chiefs.

But weeks later, no one has been punished and the Uru-eu-wau-wau fear the worst.

The tribe shared their cellphone images with Brazil’s Federal Police,
who caught one suspect trespassing on their land. But a judge refused
to issue an arrest warrant.

Authorities said they are still looking for David Elias da Silva, a local farmer they allege led the January invasion.

Reuters visited his home just outside the reservation. His wife Suely
declined to disclose his whereabouts. She said he was innocent and
blamed tribesmen for the unrest.

“The Indians don’t work. They don’t do anything. And that is the cause of all this trouble,” she said.

ATTACKS ON THE RISE

Conflicts with illegal miners and loggers have intensified in the
Amazon region states of Pará and Maranhão, FUNAI said. With law
enforcement stretched thin, some tribes have formed armed militias to
protect their lands.

The Brazilian Socialist Party, the PSB, on Jan. 31 filed a case with
the Supreme Court challenging Bolsonaro’s decision to give the
Agriculture Ministry authority to determine reservation boundaries. The
high court has yet to rule.

Bolsonaro’s plan to assimilate Brazil’s indigenous people is a
reversal of federal policy protecting their habitat, languages and
customs, according to Cleber Buzzatto, the executive secretary of CIMI,
the advocacy group. He fears the changes could lead to ethnocide.

Ethnographer Sydney Possuelo, a leading authority on isolated tribes, is worried too.

In December, he was in the Javari Valley reservation in the far west
of Brazil, a region home to the highest concentration of uncontacted
tribes in the world. Locals told Possuelo they had seen several hundred
armed “white” men in boats enter the reservation on the Javari River,
where they poached fish and turtles, cut down trees and prospected for
minerals.

One night, some of them opened fire on the small FUNAI station built
on the reservation. They were repelled by four policemen who happened to
be there on an annual visit. FUNAI agents who spoke to Reuters
confirmed the attack. No arrests were made.

“The situation of Brazil’s indigenous people has never been very
good. But in 42 years working in the Amazon, this is the most dangerous
moment I’ve seen,” Possuelo said by telephone.

“Loggers, miners, hunters, fishermen who invade reservations think the president is on their side now,” he said.